Train your brain

All those histograms were nice but here is the picture I really wanted. This allows a pretty rich comparison of all the men’s fields (women coming soon in their own plot). A brief explanation:

Line in the box represents median

Maroon diamond is mean

The box represents the second and third quartiles (meat) of the field.

The A, A+ and B fields have really good compositions. The second and third quartiles are compact and the bottom whiskers are relatively short. B+ isn’t bad. SS and beginner show a wide range of ability levels within the fields. The SS field has the largest difference between median and mean — which indicates a lot of pretty fast guys with a fairly thick tail of slower racers. The juniors men have a similar profile which isn’t too surprising.

If one had the power, it would be fairly easy to redistribute some racers into different categories and get narrower distributions. However, this shows that things aren’t really that bad. it also shows that, in general, fields are combined in a reasonable manner.